It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s the Fort St. Joseph archaeologists at the Air Zoo!

Hello Buddies! Its Raegan Delmonico back again with another archaeology and kids camp crossover blog! This past Thursday, Meghan, one of our public outreach coordinators, and I had the opportunity to go and present to a middle school camp that took place at the Air Zoo. Working with kids is always something I have enjoyed doing and having another chance to get kids involved in archaeology was great.

Teaching the Air Zoo campers 

archaeological techniques.

We arrived at the Air Zoo and went straight to the classroom. The kids were all between the ages of 11 and 13. They were a really energetic group and were excited to learn. We started off by doing some archaeology and paleontology flash cards with them and seeing how much they knew about archaeology. Most of them had a pretty good grip on the difference between archaeology and paleontology already! We followed up by doing an “other people’s garbage” activity and did some inferences based on what objects were in a bag. One bag contained a few coffee cups and some fast food wrappers, and the kids were able to hypothesize that the items probably belonged to a busy person who was running short on sleep. In the second bag there was a box of crayons, a receipt to a toy store, a jar of baby food, and an eraser head. They guessed that this was a person who lived a completely different lifestyle than the person who produced the items for the first bag. They also anticipated that this person probably had two kids that were different ages.

            Next, we showed off the artifact cases which highlighted some of our amazing finds from our units at Fort St. Joseph this past year. The campers were full of great questions about the artifacts and where we found them! They were very interested in the processes and methods used while excavating. Later in the morning we were able to go outside with them and do some mock excavating in a kiddy pool. The campers mapped out their units and carefully troweled away the soil. They took measurements from their mock datum lines and wet screened all of their sediment. They found “artifacts” that had been hidden by their camp counselor, Katie. It was a great hands-on activity for the kids to practice actual excavation techniques without visiting an excavation site.

The students and campers use
 trowels just like this everyday.

            Visiting the Air Zoo was a blast! Sharing my passion for archaeology with anyone, especially kids is so exciting. The campers were a ton of fun to work with and were pumped to hear more about the archaeology at Fort St. Joseph. It was a great opportunity to teach more people about the excitement and importance of archaeology. Thank you so much to the Air Zoo for the chance to present to some of your summer campers! We hope to come back soon!